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gilgsn writes "Preparations for Orion's first mission in 2013 are well under way as a Lockheed Martin-led crew begins lean assembly pathfinding operations for the spacecraft. The crew is conducting simulated manufacturing and assembly operations with a full-scale Orion mockup to verify the tools, processes and spacecraft integration procedures work as expected."

In theory, it could be launched on another platform. Right now, there is a lot of development in capsules and the like from various companies. Boeing has its capsule under development. There are a few others in various levels of development.

Ares is mostly toast now. It will rise or fall under a political fight, but honestly, whether Constellation flies, or not, the Orion capsule is no longer is the only game in town. The problem with a lot of this positioning of such-and-such program as THE next step rather ignores the simple fact that we are no longer in a single path of development. Its no accident that this article was released on PRWire a day after a flurry of articles about Boeing being ready in 2014 with an article claiming that Orion will be ready in 2013.

In the meantime, the Dragon capsule being designed by SpaceX is making it first real flight next month. Heck, it is already at the cape ready for launch, and all they are doing now is a waiting game to get a launch slot to open... and some last minute tests to take care of some engineering questions they have about the rocket. This is both a test for the Falcon 9 (its second flight) and the capsule, but in this case they are doing some in-orbit testing of the avionics, the Draco thrusters, and the heat shield for re-entry purposes. They are also testing recovery procedures in what is for now an unmanned vehicle.

I'd have to agree that the timing of this is a little suspect, and the rocket that the Orion is supposedly going to be flying on has yet to even be approved for funding in the first place. The Obama administration may be eying a variant of DIRECT right now, but that isn't really ready for prime time. Boeing, on the other hand, is going to be flying their CST-100 on a Delta IV. That is a proven rocket system with over a dozen flights to certify its reliability and to work out the bugs in terms of getting things into orbit.

The question for what the Orion is going to be flying on in order to make this test is a very real question that ought to be asked. Perhaps a heavy launch variant of the Delta IV, Atlas V, or the Falcon 9 might be able to get it up into space, but there was some explicit engineering done on the Orion vehicle to make sure it couldn't fly on the EELVs. Yes, this was by design and it was done to make sure it had to fly on the Ares I rocket. How Lock-Mart is going to refit this to fly on something else is going to be real interesting. I thought they were well past the raw specification stage and were making mock-ups and building actual hardware.

The Delta IV isn't man rated. Neither is the Atlas-V. NASA is not going to be sending astronauts up on either of them for quite some time. Dragon/Falcon is man rated, but it is quite a bit smaller than an Orion capsule, or even the CST-100

However, requirements for commercial crew companies under the new model haven't even been released yet.

I find it disingenuous to be having NASA come up with commercial crew regulations when they clearly are acting as a competitor to the companies who are trying to put commercial crew vehicles into service. If that doesn't strike you as something odd, I am at a loss as to what would. I don't understand why Congress is insisting that NASA set the standards here.

My largest concern is that the standards, if they ever get published, will be written in such a way that nobody could possibly meet those standards.

Hey, the customer is always right. Even if NASA doesn't get a right to define what 'man rated' means by rule of law they still have the choice to buy or not to buy. SpaceX has to build to NASA's requirements because if they do not someone else will. I suppose the FAA could add to the requirements if they wanted to but if both agencies published requirements then SpaceX would have to meet both, not ignore their customer (NASA). They can't just build what they want to build and then expect NASA to be obligated to buy it from them. I suppose there are other customers out there but not so many they can afford to lose NASA. As for the FAA I don't think they would bother, NASA has been doing this for a while without them already. Plus, I think it's only within their jurisdiction until it reaches a certain height anyway.
If the Senate bill goes through NASA will not be competing with SpaceX or any of the other commercial companies. Instead NASA will be focused on heavy lift rockets and getting beyond low Earth orbit. If they are doing that then dealing with building another orbiter would be a distraction at best. I'm sure those writing the checkes would be happy to just pay SpaceX or whomever else shows up and be done with it. Now... if the House version of the NASA appropriation bill goes through then things will get strange. NASA would be stuck building another orbiter and buying from SpaceX. Heavy lift and exploration beyond low Earth orbit would get sidelined for another generation or two. I hope that bill dies.

Just who is this "somebody else" that is building to NASA's still yet to be published manned spaceflight requirements?

I firmly believe that the manned commercial spaceflight market is going to swamp and overwhelm the NASA projects in time. That isn't quite the case right now, but I think it would be bad business planning to depend solely upon NASA as the only potential customer. I'm not saying "if we build it, NASA will buy it", but rather think more along the lines of how aircraft manufacturers design ne

If NASA does not buy, who cares? Dragon is aimed right at Virgin and other commercial tourist groups. NASA is not the only customer in town either. Falcon and Dragon are looking like they have a price point that might actually allow other commercial development.

The FAA is *the* legal body to authorize launch vehicles. NASA is a research and development body and has no regulatory authority in any area, at all. Any company wishing to fly *has* to meet the FAA requirements. (The

If you can define man-rated, I'll bite here. Both the Delta IV and the Atlas V have enough thrust to place a capsule like the Orion up into orbit, or at least a manned vehicle.

I should also point out that it was an Atlas launcher (admittedly a predecessor to the current Atlas V) that has already seen service in the manned spaceflight program for NASA: It put John Glenn into orbit! Seriously, the argument that these vehicles aren't man-rated is overblown and isn't even a realistic argument here.

If you are willing to trust sending into orbit billion dollar payloads that represent a million man-hours of effort or more, that is something that at least exceeds the safety margin given for Shuttle launches and is likely to be better. There may need to be some minor tweaks to finish any honest assessment to make these vehicles man-rated, but that is very trivial compared to what is needed to get a brand-new launcher up to speed and rated for carrying astronauts. The NRO wouldn't have been sending their satellites up on these launchers if they weren't reliable.

I didn't say they weren't reliable, or that it would be difficult to do. In fact, there are initiatives underway to man-rate both rockets. This largely involves adding sensors to the engines to tell the launch abort system when they are about to go critical so that the system can pull the crew module away from what is about to be a giant fireball.

Both the Delta IV and the Atlas V have enough thrust to place a capsule like the Orion up into orbit, or at least a manned vehicle.

Actually, it appears that they don't. At least, they don't according to publicly available specifications. It appears the the Atlas V can, indeed lift the Orion to LEO.:
Atlas V Payload Capacity to LEO: 9,750–29,420 kg (21,490–64,860 lb) (Reference [wikipedia.org])
Meanwhile, the Delta IV can only lift ~23,000 kg to LEO:
Delta IV Payload Capacity to LEO: 8,600 - 22,560 kg (18,900 - 49,740 lb) (Reference [wikipedia.org]
(Though it should be noted that the Heavy variant is supposed to be able to lift up to 23,040 kg).

Apparently the Orion was designed so that it could *not* be launched on the Delta IV or the Atlas V, in order to justify the ARES-I. Of course, it wound up that the ARES-I couldn't launch it properly either.

I should also point out that it was an Atlas launcher (admittedly a predecessor to the current Atlas V) that has already seen service in the manned spaceflight program for NASA: It put John Glenn into orbit!

That's the equivalent of claiming that's there is no need to perform crash testing on a 2010 Corvette because crash testing was already done on a 1953 Corvette. (To use Slashdot's favored form of analogy.) It should be obvious on it's face that this is a ludicrous claim.But since it isn't, I sh

Man rating an existing launcher requires a complete ground up review of it's engineering and a ground up study of it's potential failure modes and the engineering required to bring the safety up to man rating requirements.

No vehicle current or past has ever been man-rated. The Shuttle, for example, has a lack of abort capability for certain parts of its launch which is part of NASA's current man-rating requirements. This killed seven astronauts in the Challenger accident in 1986. It also had for most of its lifespan a lack of ability to inspect heat tiles prior to reentry, which killed another seven astronauts, another thing that a man-rating would require.

Can't believe this weird mix of shuttle hardware could work out
cheaper than a new big dumb rocket stack. I suppose the
factories making shuttle tanks and solid rocket booster won't
need retooling, but even so, this beasty looks much more
complex than Ares.

Ares required the development of new engines, new tanking, new solid boosters, new everything. Development costs are huge, especially engine development. With the "weird mix of shuttle hardware" you've got fully developed and tested engines, fully developed and tested solid boosters. All you need to do is develop the thrust structure (fairly simple) and stiffen the tank (which is currently thinned down to cut down on weight, so really it is just skipping this step).

Can't believe this weird mix of shuttle hardware could work outcheaper than a new big dumb rocket stack. I suppose thefactories making shuttle tanks and solid rocket booster won'tneed retooling, but even so, this beasty looks much morecomplex than Ares.

It isn't really cheaper at all. Cost is not a driver here, but rather continuing to employ people in key congressional districts so NASA can gets its appropriations bill passed.

As for the factories making the tanks getting a retooling.... it is going to happen anyway. The external tank production line at Michoud has been shut down.... with a big New Orleans style parade with the final tank going down to the port and sailing off for Florida. The employees have been laid off and most of them have gone on to other jobs. There still is a crew left at the Michoud facility as there were other things going on besides the Shuttle contracts, but that was a major part of the work force there. They were going to be gearing up for the Constellation projects and specifically the Ares V, but I suppose that isn't working out so well either.

As for the ATK rockets produced at Promontory, Utah, those employees have also been laid off and many have moved onto other things. ATK landed a cute little contract for the Air Force that is sucking up those employees that they didn't want to let go and were still receiving Constellation funding (the funding is still flowing the the system).

I suppose the raw engineering has been done and there is a modest saving there, but having to bring back and train a whole new production crew from scratch sounds like an incredibly expensive proposition... especially if the funding for this is as shaky as I've ever seen any sort of project funding.

I don't expect more than a couple of flights with this hardware, even if it makes it to flight status in the first place.

Current cars and trucks bear more than a passing resemblance to cars and trucks from the 1950s and 1960s, in part because the format works well. However, one cannot honestly say that the underlying technology has not changed dramatically. We can now carry more cargo for longer distances on less fuel with greater comfort, safety, and convenience.

Just because it's an older concept does not mean it cannot work in the present (or near future).

Wings make sense when the vehicle is large enough. At some point, trips will routinely carry 100+ people, and the logistics of doing that as a capsule are daunting at best. Those craft will have wings, and there will be variants to return large masses from orbit for refurbishment.

Capsules and the shuttle were intended to perform two entirely different missions. At best, a capsule could only perform placement and perhaps repair of satellites; it cannot bring them back down. A shuttle-type system can do t

Wings do not make sense for a vertical take off ascent, but they make quite a bit of sense for the decent. The alternatives require expensive recovery operations and with respect to Russian style crashing into the dirt on parachute, hazardous to the occupants integrity.

IANAAE but I suspect novel designs that are reasonable to implement could be had which incorporate characteristics enabling glide decent to a runway but eliminate or substantially reduce the unnecessary drag on ascent. The fixed wing config

I look around at Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Saab, Aston-Martin, and a host of other manufacturers, and I see things that look a lot like the cars and trucks from back then in their basic layout: two people in front, a driver to one side or the other, steering wheel, brake and accelerator pedals...

Even the smaller European models carry the same general form as the vehicles from 50-60 years ago. The format works, and different sizes have come about to handle different needs.

So no, you didn't fix anything. You just showed yourself to be wrong, and probably heavily biased against most things from the US.

just a nitpick, but gemini would be a closer match, the mercury capsules did not have the ability to shift their orbit, they were just launched into orbit and had a small rocket pack lashed around the heatshield for a re-entry burn. Having actual orbital maneuvering capability is pretty significant in these days or satelite repairs and space station rendevous.

Gemini basically was a test-bed for a lot of things needed for apollo, such as in orbit rendevous, orbit shifting and spacewalks. Apollo then tacked o

Surprisingly, the Gemini spacecraft was in reality the proper successor to the Apollo spacecraft as it wasn't even authorized until most of the Apollo hardware had already been built. The design tempo on the Gemini spacecraft was rather high, and there were several innovations put into the Gemini spacecraft that never even made it into the Apollo design which had improved safety for the astronauts and represented a later design.

The one difference is that the Gemini spacecraft went into orbit first, and bec

It's not quite as bad as calling it "Apollo" or "The Space Shuttle" but still, they should have known it would confuse people.

Hey, I've got a great idea for an email virus scanner. I'll call it "Carnivore!" Ooh, and I have a way to detect if anyone has tampered with your computer, I'll call it "Palladium."

And I've got a digital video playing technology I think I'll call "DivX".:)

Sometimes names get repurposed and the new purpose sticks. If there hadn't been the historical connotations, "Orion" is actually a much better name for "manned spaceflight" than "Apollo" (which is only slightly better than "Icarus" if you're not planning a mission into the Sun).

On the other hand, Apollo was a good solid brand, and it's a pity they can't do an "Apollo Phase II" or "Apollo Next Generation".

Yes, Apollo was a good solid brand but I wouldn't want to see it re-used any time soon.
Then all the little kiddies who think going back to a capsule after 30 years of winged craft that could do no better than low Earth orbit would REALLY get annoying with their 70s technology cracks.

There are a lot of people (mostly Baby Boomers who haven't kept track) that think NASA is still receiving about 5%-10% of the federal budget. NASA used to be listed on IRS publications like the 1040 instruction booklet for where tax dollars are being spent. It became such a minor budget item that it was dropped altogether and lumped under "miscellaneous appropriations".

It should also be noteworthy that NASA isn't even the largest space agency in the U.S. Federal government at the moment, as that honor goes to the National Reconnaissance Office. Other agencies such as NOAA and even the Department of Agriculture (mainly with the Forest Service) are even involved with spaceflight.

Skylab? ISS? If Skylab gets any mention it needs to include 'Skylab dropped into the sea practically unused'. Honestly I wouldn't include either in that timeline. Public awareness comes from doing something which is either a big step forward or blowing people up. We did low Earth orbit with project Mercury. The ISS is stuck in low Earth orbit. The rovers are great but we had probes on Mars some time ago too.

Really? I remember seeing Skylab footage on the BBC news when I was growing up. There was even a segment about it on Newsround (a news show aimed at children). There was a lot of interest in Pioneer and Voyager (before my time, but recordings from the news was used in some of my science classes at school) and the footage from Cassini-Huygens in 2004 was plastered all over the press. I also remember the pictures of Jupiter from the Ulysses probes in 1992 making the six o'clock news. When the first photo

I could see Korea or Iran doing this 20-30 years from now just to piss the US off. China might even be a contender for that... they would certainly have the capability quicker though they might be a little too diplomatic to go there. Not that diplomatic though given the weather satellite they blew up. (Yes the US did that too but at least they picked one in a orbit where the debris would fall to Earth rather than create long term shrapnel)

Anyone with just a passing familiarity with the US space programme is unlikely to know about the nuclear Project Orion of yesteryear. Anyone who is familiar with the US space programme is not going to confuse the two.

I totally want them to make a Footfall movie and really use a Project Orion craft. Usually they just have a technobabble solution for how the humans beat the aliens, but in that case you didn't need to use technobabble. The humans really did have a big stick, they were going to kick your ass, and there wasn't anything you were going to be doing about it.

Unfortunately I don't think the Space Shuttles are going to be available for use with the Orion-class vessel (called "Michael" in the book). They were supposed to be acting like fighters from the mothership being more like a carrier. I don't know if that ever would have worked, but at least it was plausible and something other SciFi movies have tried to take advantage of.

I agree it would make a might fine movie and something that ought to be made. The whole plot line with the Soviet Union isn't nearly as

Unfortunately I don't think the Space Shuttles are going to be available for use with the Orion-class vessel (called "Michael" in the book). They were supposed to be acting like fighters from the mothership being more like a carrier. I don't know if that ever would have worked, but at least it was plausible and something other SciFi movies have tried to take advantage of.

I agree it would make a might fine movie and something that ought to be made. The whole plot line with the Soviet Union isn't nearly as im

The biggest problem I see off hand is explaining why the aliens do not subvert our own computer networks which are much more important now then when the story was written but it would be easy enough to make a point that such subversion was insufficient in itself without military action. The aliens would at least have considered it.

The bigger problem is that the alien strategy didn't make a lick of sense. If they were truly alien, unknowable alien, then we could accept that. But their psychology was so human they may as well have been human. So then you get back to the question of what the hell they thought their strategy was going to be.

As an example of a historic screwup, Japan vs. the US. The Japanese believed in their racial superiority over the decadent, honorless West. They also believed that they had a right and duty to conquer

Truely alien aliens do not make very good stories because of the difficulty of the audience identifying with them. Niven wrote an essay about how to write science fiction that mentions this. The Fithp psychology was not human but was that of a herdbeast. One either submits or fights (or runs away but the humans could hardly leave Earth).

As an example of a historic screwup, Japan vs. the US. The Japanese believed in their racial superiority over the decadent, honorless West. They also believed that they h

I totally want them to make a Footfall movie and really use a Project Orion craft. Usually they just have a technobabble solution for how the humans beat the aliens, but in that case you didn't need to use technobabble. The humans really did have a big stick, they were going to kick your ass, and there wasn't anything you were going to be doing about it.

Footfall had some good ideas but was a fairly dreadful book, not up to their usual standard. I did like the idea of Earth fighting back with an orion drive ship. The only problem is that it required a lot of colossal stupidity on the part of the aliens to ever let it become a human-winnable fight. There had to be the right combination of immaturity, lack of forethought, idiotic assumption that aliens will react to your gestures with the exact same psychology, etc. If you're going to war, dropping rocks is a

Interestingly enough, 8008 variants are still being used widely and make up the backbone of most computers on the internet. The 8086 and its successor chips are all a 100% superset of the 8008, and is also completely compatible with software written for the 8008 on an opcode level, discounting I/O routines.

As for Comcast, I just had a salesman who came to my door this past week asking me if I wanted to sign up for their service. I told him where to shove his company and that I thought their service stank.

They reused the name. Specifically, Lockheed-Martin, the prime contractor on this system, chose to name their system Orion, while NASA had previously named on of its own projects Orion. So really, there's the Lockheed Orion and the NASA Orion. The Orion referred to in the article is here [wikipedia.org].

Well to be fair, in the myths you are referring to, Orion is the best hunter that ever lived according to the Greeks. He died by scorpion sting in most variants of the myth due to either boasting about his hunting abilities, or threatening to kill every beast on the surface of the Earth because he was such a great hunter. As such, various gods (usually Artemis or Gaia) designed the scorpion (either giant or tiny, depending on the variant of the myth) to prevent him from doing just that. So the only reason

Hmmm, the link looks like it has been slashdotted, but since it says "archives," it might not even be the right one. Maybe they meant this one? [marketwatch.com]

As inspiring as the STS program was, it's time to move on. Thinking about a craft that weighs several thousand tons being used to move crew and cargo into space on the same ride just doesn't make sense. We can send an unmanned cargo ship into orbit quite easily, without needing all of the protection that a "human cargo" would require. Having a tiny Orion spacecraft bring the people makes a lot more sense.

How did we get into the "combined crew & cargo" paradigm? Perhaps it was because of the difficulty in providing unmanned vessels that made it to the specified destination, or perhaps it was because the Gemini and Apollo astronauts really hated being compared to the "chimp in a suit" and forced NASA's to put people on every ship.

I'll just be glad when I see something smaller than a double-wide mobile home being used to ferry the humans into space.

Hi, it is the right one... I added maxconnections to MySQL, but still having trouble... I am using a CDN, but there is a video on the page which I think is still pulled from the server, and I think that's what causing the overload. Last time I was slashdotted, that didn't happen... Sorry about that...

Inspiring?More like sickening. The shuttle was my first lesson that management will fuck up anything engineers ever do. The Shuttle was designed to bring bacon to senate districts not explore space in any meaningful way, and surely not reduce costs doing it.

You lead a sheltered life, my friend. Lots of crap doesn't work nearly as well as it might, just because Management said to make it cheaper. The Shuttle works pretty damned well, in spite of Management making insanely stupid decisions.

Considering that Skylab has just over half of the volume of the ISS, I think you are being quite generous here suggesting it would take that many flights with a Saturn V. 2-3 flights for the habitation modules and a couple more perhaps for the power farm, and it would have been a kick-ass station that would put to shame what is currently called the ISS. I think it certainly could have been built for far less than the $100 billion that the ISS has burned through too.

i've seen calculations about how many hubbles the americans could have sent up for the cost of the repair missions (and that is just the mission costs, not counting the cost for the shuttles actual ability to do this), hint, it is more then one...

As for the shuttle teaching you what not do, fair point, but does it really take 30 years or keeping an expensive space el-camino in service to figure out it isnt the best idea?

Considering the cost of building the Hubble Telescope was between $2-$3 billion dollars, it would take several shuttle launches to equal that cost. Admittedly, a series of telescopes that were each costing about $1 billion and launching them for another half billion on EELVs might have been more cost effective, but not substantially so. Overall, the total cost of the program has been calculated at the high end as being about $6 billion. That would have covered the cost of only 3-4 telescopes. Presuming

It is possible that even in the late 80s, people might not have legitimately realized what a waste the Shuttle was. So charitably, the lesson should have been learned by 1990 that the Shuttle would hinder US space development. No further commercial payloads and military/spy payloads were running out. So what was the Shuttle doing flying another two decades? What lessons of failure did we still need to learn, that we hadn't already learned by 1990? I can't think of anything. But continuing t

I have this sinking feeling that the Apollo program would be, by similar standards, also a waste. I'm interested in what NASA program you think is not a waste, and why.

Any activity which contributes to an enduring US presence in the Solar System is not a waste.

Using S1B sounds good, but do we actually want 70s technology?

We have the EELVs, Delta IV and Atlas V. They can be extended beyond their current payload limits and/or new rockets developed within the lineage. SpaceX also has a proposal for extending the Falcon series all the way to Saturn V class. My thinking on this matter though is that we should learn how to do more with existing launch infrastructure rather than expend effort to build large rockets again. All of the above

I still assert that had NASA kept the Apollo/Saturn program going... including perhaps a scaled back but continued production of the Saturn V and certainly the Saturn 1B vehicles... that NASA would have put more astronauts into space, had fewer casualties, and been to many more places besides running around in circles at low Earth orbit. We know that the Apollo spacecraft were capable of interplanetary spaceflight... because it went places other than merely orbiting the Earth.

Well, Apollo used it quite well. Y'know, send the crew up with the LEM, etc. The reason for this was that NASA felt it couldn't successfully validate the two different launch systems (one for the LEM, etc. and one for the crew) in time to meet the "end of the decade" schedule.

In the case of the space shuttle, one reason was that NASA was going to use satellite launches to subsidize the manned space program. We're going to send a rocket into space. If we can get people to pay us to take some satellites w

It might have been in theory a way to subsidize the flights, but the practical matter of how it turned out is that it was the shuttle flights that subsidized the satellite launches... to the point that it took out private spaceflight efforts like the Conestoga [wikipedia.org] rocket. I have no idea if these guys could have been commercially successful, but competing against the insanely low cargo rates quoted by NASA was one of the reasons why this company never was able to make a profit and ultimately why it shut down.

Why not? The only time you need to separate the crew and the cargo is during an abort. The cargo is expendable. The crew, not so much. Where the shuttle failed is that it did not have a crew abort mode.

Because Congress refused to fund the expensive heavy lift launchers required to support the "separate crew and cargo" paradigm. Without expensive heavy lift launchers to place destinations for a cheap Shuttle into orbit, you end up with an expensive medium lift launcher to carry the destinations into orbit inside the (expensive) Shuttle.Or, IOW, the "separate crew and cargo" paradigm we're adopting is only possible because the Shuttle has